Leading Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

I read in the papers that I had it all wrong.
    A few days later, I plugged my phone back in. It was time, I decided, to face the music. The phone rang almost immediately, but it wasn’t Sammy. “You’re coming tonight, right? You
are
coming.” It was Robin calling; she was talking about a
KNOW
party that was being thrown that evening.
    Every couple of months,
KNOW
threw a promotional event at one of the hot New York nightclubs. This was back when subscriptions were booming and the magazine industry was still in a partying mood. It was also the tail end of the clubbing era, when places like Nell’s and Limelight were still so cool even people who lived on the Manhattan side of the bridges and tunnels would wait on line to get in. The lines were especially long when
KNOW
threw a party, with mobs of photographers pushing at the doors to get in. (Guests at
KNOW
’s bashes ran the gamut from supermodels to secretaries of state.) Best of all, the magazine’s staffers had insta-passes to the center of the bacchanal. We got to stroll past the crowds, pinch the noses of the gorillas guarding the velvet rope, and saunter straight on into the club. Still, I wasn’t feeling much like socializing.
    “Oh c’mon!” Robin moaned into the phone. “It’ll befun. Maybe you can steal some movie star’s girlfriend. I hear Jim Carrey might show up tonight. You can leave with his plus one.”
    The idea of going home with anyone other than Samantha made me sick to my stomach. Not that I could get a movie star’s girlfriend to talk to me, let alone leave a party with me. But I couldn’t stay holed up in my studio apartment for the rest of my life. And I knew Robin wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
    There was a guy playing show tunes with a pair of spoons and some water glasses
—KNOW
always arranged “kooky” acts to entertain its guests—as well as about three hundred revelers drinking and dancing. The club was in an ancient brick building on Twenty-fifth Street—a century earlier, it had probably been a textile factory filled with child laborers—that had been gutted and converted into a multilevel hipster paradise. Every dimly lit floor was decorated with pool tables and leather Le Corbusier loungers.
    Jim Carrey wasn’t there, but I spotted a slew of other, lesser celebrities. I saw Jeremy Irons chatting with Gary Sinise at the bar. I saw Linda Evangelista and Helena Christensen scarfing down shrimp at the seafood buffet. I saw Kyle MacLachlan and Dan Hedaya standing on the same line for the men’s room. Years later, after I became a more seasoned entertainment writer, I’d attend Hollywood parties that would make this one look as lame as a
Real World
reunion. But at the time, a close encounter with any celebrity, even Dan Hedaya, seemed new andexotic to me. It was at this party, and others like it, that I first came to the realization that the famous were different from you and me. In fact, I began to suspect that they weren’t even the same species. They seemed to exist in a whole different dimension, a mesmerizing, alien world filled with bursting flashbulbs and bustling red carpets and vastly superior bone structure.
    The world Sammy had just moved into.
    I wandered through the club, observing famous creatures for a while. Then, at the bar, I ran into Ernie Moore, one of the few stars at the party I actually did know. I had interviewed the intense young Method actor just a month earlier, over lunch in SoHo, for a 150-word article on a Montgomery Clift bio-pic he was about to start shooting. It was my biggest story at
KNOW
so far; mostly I’d been getting assigned fifty-word obituaries on retired financiers and diplomats for the Endings page. But when one of the entertainment writers got stomach flu, I was asked to fill in at the last minute, like an understudy getting a big break. There wasn’t enough light in the nightclub to read a wristwatch but, true to form, Moore was wearing a pair of dark sunglasses.